BookWars

Are books an addiction? That's one of many questions posed by this documentary from NYU film school graduate Jason Rosette. A better question might be "Does it matter?" or "Why should the audience care?", both of which remain substantively unanswered. Rosette introduces his film flashback-style, relating the story of how he found himself with a roommate who would blow all the rent money, forcing him to sell his book collection on the streets of New York. Lo and behold, a whole new subculture opened up to him -- it seems there are lots of people who do this, most of whom purchase their volumes at yard sales in the suburbs, restore those that need work, and seal less popular tomes in plastic bags to make them appear more valuable. Each dealer has his own unique personality, but Rosette really focuses primarily on one, a nature book collector named Pete who also has a fixation for toads and crickets, and spends the winter months shampooing some rather bemused-looking cats. Rosette seems to know that it's hard to make the art of book-vending visually exciting, so he tries to jazz things up by occasionally switching to black and white, and pretentiously adding fake grain and "threads" to his video imagery in a misguided attempt to make it look like film, or a Nine Inch Nails video, perhaps. The story picks up a bit when Mayor Giuliani starts to get tough on street vendors, and the cops become steadily more threatening, but Rosette's justification of book vending via a loose interpretation of the First Amendment ("The right to distribute literature") is weak -- why don't these folks actually try to start a legitimate bookstore? (Answer: Because then they'd have to pay rent and sales tax.) Documentaries can work when the director is an active participant -- witness the recent Fastpitch -- but in this case, the director lacks the perspective needed to do his subject justice. Even one opposing viewpoint would have added some much-needed depth.